$12.95

Hokku[0872432556]

ISBN: 0872432556

ISBN-13: 9780872432550

Writing Traditional Haiku in English: The Gift to be Simple

Here is a book that can change your life.

"There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."

So wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In our busy lives we tend to lose that freshness. The world becomes like wallpaper -- there but not really seen, all around us but seldom noticed. Writing hokku changes that. It changes the way we look at the world, even the way we look at our lives, because to write hokku we must pay attention. Attention to what? To nature, to the seasons, to the rain and wind and sun and drought, to the plants that sprout when the soil is wet and wither at the first chill of autumn. This book will tell you exactly what hokku is and how to enter this new world. (160 pages)

David Coomler is a writer and researcher drawn from an early age to the old, the obscure, and the oddly-interesting; and he has pursued this will-o'-the-wisp through tasks as varied as printing, the antique trade (in which he proved to have an excellent eye for everything but business), and art museum research. Today he divides his time inequitably among reading, writing, gardening, and the inevitable but bothersome necessity of earning his daily bread. He is the author of The Icon Handbook: A Guide to Understanding Icons and the Liturgy, Symbols and Practices of the Russian Orthodox Church and Below Sleive-na-mon: Tales of Darby O'Gill and the Good People.

EXCERPT:

"Do not think of hokku as poetry. That would only confuse you. It is just too different from what we ordinarily consider to be poetry. Think of it as sensation, an experience of one or more of the five senses. A splash of cold water against your skin on a hot day -- that is hokku. A fragrance of wild sage in the warm air of the summer hills -- that is hokku. Hokku is not thinking about the surf breaking in white spray against the rocks; hokku is seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, tasting it, feeling it on our faces.

Though hokku is simple, it is remarkably profound. Much of the difficulty of learning hokku is in achieving that simplicity, in learning to let go of the complexity and interpretation that we tend to attach to everything."